In his essay Infinite Game of Thrones , the artist Ian Cheng exam­ines the cog­ni­tive evo­lu­tion of indi­vid­uals faced with a changing envi­ron­ment, with rules end­lessly repeated and rede­fined: “Per­haps the most inti­mate crisis we face today is the limits of human con­scious­ness to really grasp non-human scaled com­plexity. What is non-human scaled com­plexity? Strangelove. Y2K. The sprawling code­base of Microsoft Windows. The Amazon rain­forest. Climate change. Big data. Antiterrorism. Cancer. The unknown unknown­ness of an expanding uni­verse. A dynamic some­thing com­posed of such vast inter­con­nec­tivity and such deep causal chains that it cannot be metab­o­lized by humans as a com­pre­hen­sible whole. Too much to hold in the head. Impervious to nar­ra­tiviza­tion [1].”

The world that we have built appears today to be dom­i­nated by an increasing ambiva­lence: that of an ever more com­plex inter­con­nect­ed­ness that allows both new modes of exchange to emerge and prac­tices and knowl­edge to cir­cu­late – yet, in an age of mass tech­no­log­ical and indus­trial pro­duc­tion, it does so with an alarming loss of leg­i­bility, and an increase in the threats to human and eco­log­ical sur­vival. At the moment when the news media is focused on the twenty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference in Le Bourget, fol­lowing two decades of attempts to nego­tiate inter­na­tional com­mit­ments to cli­mate change, Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster seeks to examine the ways in which we interact with our envi­ron­ment from a variety of dis­ci­plinary van­tage points that take into account dif­ferent eco­nomic, cul­tural, and social influ­ences. Indeed, the dis­tinc­tion, as it still too often pre­vails, should be avoided between issues rel­e­gated to the “en­vi­ron­mental” realm (pol­lu­tion, global warming, preser­va­tion of nat­ural resources, loss of bio­di­ver­sity, etc.) and others to the “so­cial” realm (migra­tion, employ­ment, racial, sexual and wealth inequality, public health, vio­lence, etc.), in order to seek viable responses are sought to the var­ious upheavals with which we are cur­rently con­fronted.

Seven oval spheres in Scorpio according to the charts, probable deadly Friday, chance of a two-Tuesday mock week, brackish drizzles in the midlands, lozenges melting in the drugstores.

Echoing the metaphor put for­ward by the writer Haytham el-Wardany in his essay “Notes on Disaster” [2], the exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster seeks to examine, not the tragic dimen­sion that inheres in a state of dis­aster, but rather the trans­for­ma­tions and forms of col­lec­tive action that dis­aster occa­sions. This raises the ques­tion of eman­ci­pa­tion and re-empow­er­ment, in the sense that dis­aster, as el-Wardany argues, “is a com­munal event, in which stricken indi­vid­uals band together in a stricken group and search for a new begin­ning. And in this way, it is also a polit­ical event, for dis­aster is a col­lec­tive fum­bling towards a new reality in which the indi­vidual might finally return to him­self.” In other words, how to trans­form a crit­ical sit­u­a­tion into a fer­ment of renewal that gives itself to thought, both indi­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively [3] ?

Government relaxes moon control. Moons behave erratically. You are urged to stay indoors.

Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster pro­poses an alter­na­tive per­spec­tive, a change of out­look based on the spec­u­la­tive power of sto­ry­telling and science fic­tion, as a means to rethink the ways we inhabit our envi­ron­ment. Bringing together a dozen works, for the most part resulting from col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­cesses, the exhi­bi­tion will also hold a reg­ular series of talks and public events. Artists, researchers, and activists from dif­ferent fields have been invited to par­tic­i­pate in var­ious work­shops and meet­ings, notably with stu­dents from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris Cergy and the Université Paris Diderot. Shifting the focus away from an anthro­pocen­tric view­point, the dif­ferent approaches and works brought together in the exhi­bi­tion allow for a renewed aware­ness of other forms of life, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and inter­ac­tion. Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster has been con­ceived as a space ded­i­cated to exploring new forms of lan­guages and syntax – with the wager that future pos­si­bil­i­ties to live and cohabit will depend on the atten­tion we pay to mul­tiple modes of expres­sion and aware­ness.

Two suns cooling at the horizon, restless moons, animals should be sheltered, travelers are warned, all craft should return to port, possible flood on The Jelly, toxic snakes in the treetops, the wind alive again, temperatures will [4] …

Exhibition partnerInitiated by Musée d’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris, Co-Workers unfolds over twodif­ferent chap­ters: The Network as Artist in the space of ARC at Musée d’Art mod­erne, and Beyond Disaster at Bétonsalon Centre for Art and Research.

Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster is sup­ported by the Région Île-de-France, Arcadi Île-de-France as part of Némo, Biennale inter­na­tionale des arts numériques - Paris / Île-de-France, and from Imago Mundi Foundation (Cracow, Poland) in the frame­work of the Place Called Space pro­gramme (pro­ject co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the Malopolska Regional Operational Programme for 2007-2013). Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster is also sup­ported by the pro­gramme UPDN - Usages des pat­ri­moines numérisés pro­gram (Idex SPC).

Notes

[1] Ian Cheng, “Infinite Game of Thrones,” originally published in The Machine Stops, ed. Erik Wysocan (New York : Halmos, 2015).

[2] Haytham el-Wardany, “Notes on Disaster,” originally published in the online magazine ArteEast Quarterly (Winter 2015). Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.

[3] See the essay by Giovanna Di Chiro, “Living Environmentalisms: Coalition Politics, Social Reproduction, and Environmental Justice”, originally published in Environmental Politics, 17:2, 276-298, Routledge, 2008. Di Chiro calls for a “living environmentalism” in which citizens can combine forces in order to preserve or regenerate the ecosystems that influence the reproductive processes on which all communities depend.